Bruce Dorfman at Hal Katzen - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Jan, 1995 by Gerrit Henry

Dorfman, a veteran instructor at both the Art Students League and the New School for Social Research, brings something entirely his own to the collage medium. In a way, his work can be described as a cross between the fastidious junk collages of Kurt Schwitters and the somehow glamorous crushed metal sculptures of John Chamberlain.

Dorfman relies on some of the same ephemera and objets trouve as Schwitters--crinkled foil from the necks of wine bottles, colored papers (Robert Motherwell, with his Gauloisespack collages, also comes to mind here) and bits and pieces of scrap metal that he sometimes paints. Yet Dorfman's scale, even at a fairly typical 10 1/2 by 15 inches, is somehow epic. It is derived, one senses, from the heroic dimensions of Action painting. His color sense--he uses vivid blood reds, tawny yellows and purplish umbers--is similarly brash and auto-shop contemporary. His stroke, as well, attests to Abstract Expressionist influences--it is both zealous and fine.

Dorfman is more calculated in his compositions than his forebears from the '50s. The artist also owes a debt to '60s Minimalism. His penchant for the quasi-geometric, crossed with his brut tastes, results in wonderfully dynamic, energetic and tense--even "anxious"--works. Small Red Stroke is a handsome dynamo consisting of a top third of finely incidentalized, deep-red paper, overlapping rectangles of red-brushed aluminum at center and far more thinly painted and lyrical paper horizontals at bottom, in deciduous shades of red-yellow (flecked with puncture holes), a kind of salmon rose and beigey yellow.

Perhaps more than in other forms of art, good collage calls for esthetic invention of a demanding, self-generating sort--thus the link with the eternal identity crisis of Action painting as well as the notorious "anxious object." Dorfman is up to the challenge.